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While Britain's official inflation figures may have been too high and prices overestimated.

Richard Heys, the deputy chief economist of the Office for National Statistics, said the body will change the way it counts the numbers in the future.

He told a seminar at the new Economics Statistics Centre of Excellence that there has been a 'disconnect between the technical performance and the economic measurement of the [telecoms] industry'.

Mr Heys said officials have historically measured the revenues and output of mobile companies like EE, Vodafone and O2 separately.

But issues arose when statisticians tried to adjust for inflation in order to generate the real output of telecoms companies.

Chancellor Philip Hammond (pictured in Downing Street earlier this week) will welcome news the UK's economy could be bigger than previously thought

Official data show the prices of the telecoms sector was flat between 2010 and 2015 and turnover declined slightly - meaning it was a drag on official productivity figures.

But researchers now believe the way prices are measured does not reflect the improved bundles of calls, texts and data offered on both fixed and mobile networks.

If these were included, prices would be recorded as having fallen by 35 per cent, the research paper found.

Diane Coyle, a professor at Manchester University and one of the paper's authors, said: 'My hunch is that the digital effects will make a difference but not enough to explain away the productivity slowdown.'